Firefox 121 Is Looking Good For Having Wayland Enabled By Default

Firefox 121 is aiming to ship with Wayland support enabled by default rather than falling back to XWayland on modern Linux desktops. So far things are looking up for this indeed remaining the case for next month's Firefox 121 stable release.

This week brought the Firefox 120 stable release and thus Firefox 121 now in beta. The Wayland support remains enabled by default on Firefox 121, through beta 3 as of yesterday's release is still on by default and will hopefully remain that way for stable.

This native Firefox Wayland support allows for touchpad and touchscreen gestures, swipe-to-nav, per-monitor DPI settings, better graphics performance and more. With time the Firefox Wayland support has matured quite well and is in robust shape now. In my testing of the Firefox 121 betas it's been working out great.

The meta bug tracker is tracking a few bugs in recent days including the input method window position lags behind, an unconfirmed Firefox crash when dragging the window across multiple monitors, etc, but hopefully they will be resolved and/or not lead to a last minute change of defaults for Firefox 121.

Firefox 121 is planned for release on 19 December as what would make a great Christmas present with Wayland support enabled by default. With KDE Plasma 6.0 set to default to the Wayland session and other Wayland adoption milestones being hit elsewhere, 2024 could possibly be the year of Wayland dominating the Linux desktop.